Enhancing Research Results with Programmable Blockchain Network

Since its inception in 2008, Blockchain has been proposed in different fields of study, and the research results have shown promising prospects in these areas. Despite these study results, blockchain technology has suffered some setbacks in adoption for real-life implementations. The unwillingness to adopt it stems from industries and organizations not being convinced about the proposed solutions’ results. The reason is that many of the presented solution results come from simulation. While simulation results are acceptable for research purposes, industries might be skeptical about adopting a new system based only on simulation results. Researchers must present results from real-life implementations to fully convince stakeholders of the usefulness of adopting blockchain technology. However, presenting blockchain results from real-life performance is challenging because of the following significant problems: 1. Blockchain networks are customized to implement a single approach, i.e., no blockchain network can test multiple proposed implementations concurrently, and 2. There is a lack of testbeds (with enough blockchain nodes) to test proposed solutions. This ongoing work presents a Programmable Blockchain Network (PBN), which can implement multiple approaches simultaneously and a global testbed to evaluate proposed solutions in real-life scenarios. The PBN, implemented on Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) global testbed, uses a master-slave model for smart contracts calling to implement concurrent blockchain solutions. The preliminary result shows that the proposed solution enhances research results, convincing more industries to adopt blockchain technology.